Lynne Hill: Parallel Computing Platform - The Vision and Future

Your video is in some way better than the PDC keynote. Manuvir explains Azure better (less marketing blabla).
This is similar to Amazon's EC2. And it looks very intresting. I'm looking forward to find out how small organisation can use this.
In my opinion the standout statement in that video went something like this, forgive me ill be paraphrasing a bit... "... Azure will do for the cloud what windows did for the desktop ..."
So true.. well done to everyone that was involved in this project!
I really like how microsoft is setting up this Azure enviroment, where every application is compleatly scallable, and protected from any kind of hardware errors. What I would like to see though is an extention of the "developer" version of azure (the one
used by visual studio), so that we can take azure applications, and run them on our machines using our bandwith. It would be a more "advanced" version as it requires a bit more provisioning, but it would all compleatly scallability from one single computer
(like the developer version of azure that already exists), to an intranet behind a company firewall, and then out on the web hosted by someone like microsoft.
There are several reasons for this "corporate" version of azure. I know that you guys pay tons of money for your hardware and bandwith, and that cost will have to be passed on to us companies creating these services, while I can get much cheaper hardware and
bandwith if i dont care as much about 24/7 service (not to mention all the support staff that you guys must have for this). The second reason is that not all data can be stored out on the cloud. Especialy very sensative data (credit card #'s, social security
#'s, medical records, etc), where it just cant (for reasons of regulations or buiesness reasons) be hosted by someone else.
I dont care if azure takes over all the machines (ie no other OS running), and I would expect to pay a per machine (or cpu/core) cost (as well as a per machine cost for each of the machines that can use the extra services like sql services). But having a uniform
way of provisioning a group of 10-100 servers, along with automatic duplication and failover on my own servers would be really nice.
also, off topic but still,
the c9 reply button doesnt work for me, it just sends me back to the first page of the thread :/
Thank you very much Manuvir. You explained the architecture of this technology in detail and very clearly.
I am very much excited on this technology. I had registered in
www.azure.com and I have installed azure SDK to work on some sample (ASP.NET Hello world sample) but whenever I try to create host service none of the services are availble there. I noticed the below message.
Register for Services*
*Due to pre-release CTP status, you may be temporarilyplaced on a waiting list for certain services.
Also I noticed that, under the "Account" section in the site, I need to put Resource Token ID and need to claim the token. But I haven't recieved any email with that information.
Any body know how I can get host services to work on some samples ?
As a former Microsoftee it's terrific to see MSFT come up with a technology that will help developers in a huge (central) way. Manuvir's explanation has reeled me in!
Paul Smietan
Anyone implementing an Azure based authentication solution and wanting a compatible hardware based oath token should consider using SafeID from Deepnet Security.
Details can be found in the following link;
http://www.deepnetsecurity.com/authenticators/one-time-password/safeid/hardware-mfa-tokens-office-365-azure-multi-factor-authentication/